Join the Community Conversation on Homelessness

Mar 20, 2018 10:01AM
● By Jeanne Fratello

What can we as a community do to address the problem of homelessness? The City of Manhattan Beach is hosting a meeting on Wednesday, March 21, to receive community input on how to combat and prevent homelessness in our region.

The meeting has its roots in a larger county-wide effort to address the persistent homelessness problem. In November 2017, the Los Angeles County Homelessness Initiative allocated one-time funding to support planning efforts made by cities in the Los Angeles Continuum of Care.
Manhattan Beach received one of these grants and has begun gathering
feedback from the community on the issue. The document created by the city
will serve as a road map for approaching this issue both locally and
regionally.

Currently, there are 57,794 persons in Los Angeles County who are homeless on a given night. Los Angeles County voters passed Measure H in 2017, raising $355
million annually in sales taxes, to be spent on services for homeless
people. City of Los Angeles voters approved Proposition HHH, a $1.2
billion bond to build new permanent supportive housing for homeless
people.

In Manhattan Beach, the homeless population is currently fewer than ten but tends to grow seasonally and is expected to increase. Like many cities and municipalities
across Los Angeles County, Manhattan Beach primarily interacts with its homeless
populations through a Mental Health Evaluation Team, which consists of a
clinician from the L.A. County Department of Mental Health paired with a
local police officer.

The issue of homelessness in Manhattan Beach came to the forefront of community consciousness earlier this year with the death of 'Artie,' a homeless man who lived outside Fry's Electronics and was well-known to many in town.